Space radio burst mystifies astronomers

This burst appears to have originated from the distant universe and may have been produced by an exotic event such as the collision of two neutron stars or the death throes of an evaporating black hole,  said Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Writing in the journal Science, Lorimer and colleagues said they were looking at old scans done by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia when they spotted the burst.

   The burst appears to have lasted 5 milliseconds and may be the radio fingerprint of a single event such as a supernova or the collision of black holes, the astronomers said.  “This burst represents an entirely new astronomical phenomenon,” Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University in Australia said in a statement. Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University said the event is probably not rare.  “We think there are probably many of these bursts every day that we are just not detecting because we don’t have the right kind of surveys of the sky looking for them,” McLaughlin said in a telephone interview. While satellites are detecting x-ray and gamma-ray bursts with regular surveys of large portions of the sky, radiotelescopes generally focus on a very narrow field, she said.